Blog Stats

My HP Envy 15 Monster Laptop Specs

I’ve been tweeting and crowing about how awesome my new HP Envy 15 laptop is. There are some good photos of the laptop and its packaging over at notebooks.com (this photo is borrowed from the site). Quite a few people have asked what I put in it, so I thought I’d post the specs here. I went pretty much full boat with this laptop. It wasn’t cheap (a little under US$4k), but it is blindingly fast. I figure I’m good for the next 3+ years of this Microsoft product wave, no matter what I need to do.

As an example of how great it is, I can have a MOSS VM running (4Gb), an SP2010 VM running (8Gb), and all of my usual desktop apps up and running, while listening to streaming Web radio, and the thing barely hiccups. And that’s with everything installed on the same SSDs: OS and all of the apps and VMs. (One thing to note is that the two 160Gb SSDs come set up as a single 320Gb drive.)

UPDATE 2001-05-29: One thing that I realized was missing from my monster laptop right before a presentation: a VGA port. Spring for the HP HDMI to VGA Display Adapter if you think you might be doing any presentations with a projector. Mine’s on its way.

I never was a huge fan of HP in the past but I must say, this looks very nice and sleek. What sort of battery life do you get on it with/without the extra slice? The laptop itself looks a lot slimmer than I expected!

The only time the fan really makes a lot of noise (and it isn’t all that loud) is when the CPU is totally maxed out. It’s actually pretty hard to do that, though. The only time I can force it is when I’ve got SETI@Home running on all cylinders searching for aliens.

I find that the temperature isn’t a problem. I’ve had slower laptops that ran much hotter. I do have the extra “slice” battery, which acts a little like a heat dissipator on the bottom of the machine.

The only time I notice the fans much at all is when I’m *not* using the machine and I let BOINC take over to search for aliens with SETI@Home. (Seriously. I’ve been running it since 1999. If the buggers are out there, I’m finding them.) When that’s running, I give it 90% of the CPU, so the fans run quite a bit.

As for performance, not a single complaint. No black screens or anything. The VMs (VMware® Workstation 7.0.1 build-227600) run as if I’m logged into heavy metal servers somewhere. I don’t think that I’m going to be able to max out the CPU with the current set of applications.

I’ve been reading where under heavy load there is buzzing sound coming from the notebook. Have you experienced this? Also, now that you’ve it for a while what did you find that you think could be troublesome in the long ownership of this laptop?

Think you’ve got great Active Directory data?

Try the FREE Hyperfish Analyzer
Find out just how bad your Active Directory data really is. In your custom report you will see how you are faring with key attributes including Profile Pictures, Phone Numbers, and Job Titles, as well as learn the value of an up to date Directory.